An Internet Protocol (IP) Radio Access Network (RAN) network may comprise tens of thousands of network nodes. An IP RAN network may be divided into a plurality of Interior Gateway Protocol (IGP) areas because of IGP protocol limitations, such as, scalability issues. Manually dividing IP RAN networks into IGP areas may be difficult when a network comprises a large number of network nodes. A centralized controller with a global view of an IP RAN network may be employed to obtain network topology information. However, efficiently dividing the IP RAN network into a plurality of IGP areas may be a non-deterministic polynomial time (NP)-complete problem. Dividing the IP RAN network may also affect other existing IGP areas. As such, there may be a need for efficiently dividing an IP RAN network into a plurality of IGP.